


the flood keeps rising up

by nimbostratus



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: 9/11, Adultery, Character Study, Don't Ask Don't Tell, F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, implied PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 16:08:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28798152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimbostratus/pseuds/nimbostratus
Summary: “You never made a mistake? You never hurt someone that you love? You never tried to sabotage your own happiness because easy and happy are so unfamiliar to you?”Twenty years in the life of Teddy Altman.
Relationships: Teddy Altman/Allison Browne, Teddy Altman/Owen Hunt
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	the flood keeps rising up

2001

Teddy Altman’s best friend, the love of her life and her favourite person on the planet, dies in the second tower a month after she buries her mom and a year after she buries her dad. 

She wakes up every night gasping for breath and choking back screams in the bed that they shared for a full month before she enlists. She leaves her job, her (their) apartment, her (their) devastated roommate and her (their) life behind. 

2003

The first 6 weeks in Baghdad are like being trapped in a Groundhog Day nightmare of her first year of residency. She unlearns most of what she learned at Columbia and learns what it means to be an army surgeon. She wears birds on her scrub cap for the woman she loves and tells anyone who asks that she joined for her best friend Alison. 

In her bunk at night, despite the summer heat, she dreams that she’s drowning. She’s so far below the surface that no matter how hard she swims it doesn’t seem to get any closer. Sometimes she dreams she doesn’t even know if it’s the surface she’s swimming towards. She stops and sinks, slowly at first but there’s always a point where it turns to falling and jerks her awake and upright and grasping for a hand which isn’t there. 

There’s a good five or six female medics out with her but she avoids getting to know them for the first three months. Getting too close to another woman would destroy her career. Losing another woman she loved would destroy her. Instead, she befriends a cocky womaniser by the name of Nathan Riggs. He comes as a package deal with his off-again, on-again girlfriend Megan Hunt, and her brother Owen. Soon enough they’re inseparable. 

2004

Teddy falls in love with Owen Hunt slowly and deliberately. She’s well practiced falling for her best friend. 

They work as one in the OR, spend their breaks attempting to play soccer and sharing a sense of dark humour that’s the prerequisite for staying sane in their jobs. They talk about nothing for hours, killing time standing around waiting for a transport out in the early hours. Owen is safe. He loves her. He has a fiancé back home waiting. She knows the hurt going in and it’s softer that way, a bruise instead of a wound. 

The months blur together as she pulls bullet wounds and shrapnel from torsos and faces and limbs. She sees young men blinded, paralysed, limbless, traumatised, burned. She fixes them up as best she can. Her work ebbs and flows, and she finds herself hating the quiet as much as the other medics, sleeping and kicking a soccer ball around for hours waiting but trying not to look like they’re waiting too eagerly for an incoming trauma.

The problem with quiet is that it's too much time to think. Teddy saves a man but not his leg and all she can think about until the next trauma is phantom limbs and how you can run to another continent and fall for someone you can’t have and still wake in the night reaching out for a woman who’s been dead for three years.

2005

Megan slides her tray down opposite her and fixes her with that green eyed stare that both the Hunts have in common. It means they’re about to see right through her. Teddy doesn’t realise what she’s saying at first, thinking it's just camp gossip, but then she does, with a sudden jolt. She always takes her coffee breaks with one of the scrub nurses, a tiny Texan with cropped brown hair who is one of the most laid back women Teddy’s ever met. Someone’s made an accusation about her and one of the female engineers, an insinuation that’s gone too far and is going to derail her entire career. 

Megan says, you need to be careful who you hang out with. She says, some people might get the wrong idea. 

She feels shame rising up in her chest but pushes it down almost as suddenly. Megan’s in this for life, she’s got her entire military career plotted out, obsessing over her strat and planning out her next deployment before she’s near the end of this tour. Teddy cares, of course she does, she has duty and public service drilled into her core but she hadn’t exactly been thinking clearly when she joined up and on the few occasions she’s stopped to think about it she basically just assumed she’d wake up one day and the war would be over and she’d go back to some semblance of her old life as a civilian and she’d move on. Until then she doesn’t see much point in worrying about it. 

So as a cheap distraction from having to think about the deeper implications of their conversation she allows herself to hate Megan, to properly hate her deeply and cruelly, for the rest of the day and then puts the whole thing to the back of her mind and deliberately forgets about it. Megan seems to consider her job done and she never brings it up again. 

2006

She’s signing and dating some paperwork in mid-afternoon when she realises belatedly, a tide of nausea washing over her, that she’s been mourning Alison for longer than they were actually together. 

For all the rest of the week she can’t sleep without seeing Alison’s face on the morning of her death burned into the back of her eyelids. She wakes with a jolt knowing this is the last chance she’ll have to say goodbye to her but of course when she opens her eyes she’s alone. She tries desperately to trick herself back to sleeping so she can dream of Alison but she can’t calm her mind enough to do it. 

Owen notices first, because he knows her far too well, but because he’s always been awful at expressing emotion it falls to Riggs to drag her out with them and get her completely, messily drunk in the only way he knows how to cheer her up. 

When she comes on shift the next day, with half a night of alcohol induced sleep under her belt, he’s managed to pin a printed off photo from the night before on what was originally intended to be a notice board but now functions more as a medical “hall of shame”. Megan has obviously taken the shot, which features Riggs mugging for the camera, sitting next to a laughing Owen. Owen has both his arms wrapped round Teddy who’s falling asleep, half sprawled across his lap and head against his shoulder, a picture of intimacy that Riggs is clearly oblivious to as he’s scrawled “Altman the lightweight” across it in black sharpie and stuck it up for public consumption. 

Owen laughs when he sees it but he has that telltale tightness around his eyes that means he doesn’t really approve of a joke. He gets like that, sometimes, when their ribbing of him goes a little too far. 

In her more embarrassing moments Teddy likes to think it’s because he shares her feelings. But she knows she’s being unfair to him, and to Beth who she’d only met once, briefly, and who seemed to be a lovely girl who Teddy immediately, viscerally hated and felt so guilty about hating that she’d resolved to be Owen’s friend most supportive of his engagement to make up for it. Which isn’t hard given the only other competition is Megan (vocally dismissive of Beth and their entire relationship) and Riggs (doesn’t care, wants to be left out of the conversation, but once admitted under pressure that he thought she was boring.)

2008 

Teddy’s been in love with Alison Browne for eight years. She’s been in love with Owen Hunt for half that time. She’s been washing sand out of open wounds for five years now.

Megan dies, and Riggs loses it, and Owen leaves and Teddy’s right back where she started. Alone, broken hearted, and mourning another dead best friend. 

2009

Imagine the man you’ve been in love with for half a decade breaks off his engagement and doesn’t tell you. It can make you a little crazy. It can make you a lot crazy. 

Seattle is about as far from Baghdad as you can get and the novelty of rain soon wears off. Teddy makes a series of increasingly embarrassing decisions in her personal life, wears her desperation on her sleeves but manages to pull herself out of it with the help of Arizona Robbins. 

Arizona reminds her of Alison in that she has a warmth about her that’s contagious. She’s like sunshine, she brightens up the room when she walks in and she pulls Teddy along with her. Arizona is generous with her love and her friendship and soon Teddy finds herself with a couple of close friends and a semi-regular set of girls' nights. She joins an ad hoc group of doctors and nurses who play rec softball on Tuesday evenings. She’s settling back into civilian life, and she settles into Seattle Grace too. 

Cristina helps, as despite her initial misgivings Teddy comes to be increasingly grateful for her star resident. She hasn’t really been interested in teaching until now. It’s satisfying in an abstract sense to watch her residents learn but she’s never really felt that pull towards teaching that some people have. There’s something special about Cristina though, she lives and breathes surgery and she burns with potential, sometimes so brightly that it's hard to look at her. Teddy wants to show her everything she knows, but more than that she wants to push Cristina to be better than she is. She can be so much more. 

Teddy thinks she’ll be looking back in a decade and telling her future residents that she taught Cristina Yang half of what she knows. She hasn’t allowed herself to think that many years ahead for a long time. 

2010

She tells Arizona about Allison and it’s like a dam breaking. The only person she’s properly spoken to since Alison’s death was Claire, in badly coded letters steeped in don’t ask don’t tell paranoia. Arizona understands because she comes from a military family. That you are broken down so they can rebuild you into a soldier and to be a good soldier you have to hide parts of yourself away. All the best memories that it hurt too much to remember come flooding back, and the words tumble out of her. She wants to tell Arizona everything because in telling her it's almost like making Alison alive again. She tells her about Allison’s mother, her laugh, that she named the pigeons that lived on their windowsill, how she left her hair everywhere, how they used to meet for breakfast once a week while they were falling in love and that’s why Teddy’s addicted to croissants. She tells Arizona that she hasn’t been with a woman since Alison. 

What she doesn’t tell her is: it feels like the worst sort of betrayal, to know any other woman’s body. She’s terrified that if she touches another woman she’ll forget what it felt like to touch Allison. She still catches herself daydreaming about touching her like she used to in her twenties coming off a night shift bone tired and knowing she would be going home to slip into bed beside Allison’s warm body and to wrap her arms around her. She didn’t know how it was possible to want someone so badly, to have her and still want her every second of every day and to lose her and to still feel that want running through her veins and under her skin. How she’s lived like this for ten years and probably will for fifty more.

2011

One of the disadvantages to dating a trauma counsellor is that he can see right through her. Andrew says she falls for men who aren’t available, who are engaged, who are only in town for a few weeks. He says she’s making some lousy choices. Teddy leaves him for a dying man who she married for health insurance.

2012

She finally lets herself fall in love with Henry and it's good, it really is. It's better than good. She’s a doctor so she knows the risk, and the low sense of dread that she carries in her body now is something she’s been carrying for a long time. It spikes every time he goes in for a check up but the rest of the time it’s manageable. And every hour she gets to spend with Henry is worth it. They get into a married rhythm, lazing in bed on a Sunday morning, Henry sitting in the spectators stand at her rec softball games, trying different jogging routes to find their favourite path for their weeknight runs. 

When she dreams of Alison now, they are in the kitchen and it is raining outside. It always starts out as a memory, Teddy is washing dishes and Alison is distracting her, kissing her neck and whispering in her ear. Sometimes it's the three of them - Claire attempting to make pancakes while taking mock offence to their culinary criticism, or everyone wine drunk and making outrageous edits to Claire's online dating profile, or Alison is cooking while Teddy and Claire are giving her a detailed and only mildly exaggerated breakdown of the latest Columbia gossip. The dreams all end the same way - Alison gets up, suddenly, and leaves. Teddy follows her to the door but it’s locked. Water is coming up through the floorboards. It’s halfway up the windows now. She knows that Alison’s outside and that she’s surely drowned. Teddy floats, helpless and draws desperate breaths from a solitary air bubble trapped against the ceiling. 

She wakes next to the man she loves and doesn’t have the words to tell him.

Henry dies too. The grief swallows her whole. 

2018

Teddy moves to Germany where she lives a quiet life, focuses on her work, sleeps badly but dreams rarely, and is deliberately, achingly alone. 

After five years of solitude, she opens her door one night in deep mid winter to find Owen Hunt.

2019

Teddy finally has what she always wanted, what for so many years she couldn’t even bring herself to dream of. Owen, her best friend and the man she’s loved for fifteen years, a family of her own, two children she loves more than she thought she was ever capable of loving. 

She dreams of coming home to her perfect family after a long hard day at work. Of slipping into a warm bath and lying there content. She slips her head under the water, letting her hair fan around her. And she’s holding herself there until she can’t breath, and she can’t let go, and she’s not in the bath anymore, she’s in the ocean far out where no one is coming for her. She dreams Owen is floating with her and she’s screaming at him to swim, to fight it, to swim to the surface but she can’t reach him his fingers are slipping out of her grasp and she can’t fight it any more she has to kick off and her head breaks the surface of the water and she draws in desperate gasping breaths until she can scream for him again but when she puts her head under the water she can’t even see him any more and she knows - she knows - he’s gone. 

The dreams start to slip into her waking hours. She can be fine for days and then she’ll suddenly be struck with a muted image of Owen dying in any way her subconscious can think up to torture her - he’s getting hit by a car, he’s in a plane crash, he’s developed an inoperable tumour, a patient has a gun to his head, he slips in a pool of water and is electrocuted. She finds herself ducking into on call rooms to gasp for breath, dropping to the ground and holding her head between her knees until her breathing steadies and the crippling tightness in her chest lifts just a little. 

She realises then that this is inevitable. That just like everyone she’s ever loved - her mom, her dad, Alison, Megan, Henry - she will lose Owen too. She knows she will not survive it. 

2020

She sleeps with Tom Koracick.

**Author's Note:**

> So Teddy’s mother dies, making her an orphan, and a month later her girlfriend dies in 9/11 so she joins the army in the middle of DADT and proceeds to self sabotage her own happiness for decades by falling in love with her engaged best friend and then marrying a dying man??? Honestly the perfect backstory which makes total sense for her character but was destroyed by being made into a grossly biphobic cheating stereotype and ruining everything about her. This fic is purely self-indulgent and has overwritten what actually happened on the show in my mind.


End file.
